


Worst Week Ever

by Saentorine



Series: Avengers Disassembled [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Bad Days, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Funny, Gen, Hospitals, Humor, Scars, Snark, Snarky Clint Barton, Where Was Clint Barton During Captain America 2?, mpreg scare (comedic), pregnancy scare (comedic)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 20:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3424472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saentorine/pseuds/Saentorine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that the Avengers have assembled, why would they ever fight apart? A possible explanation for why Clint wasn’t involved in the events of <i>Captain America: The Winter Soldier</i>.</p><p>Clint is having the worst week ever. Natasha is busting his balls about his pain tolerance, he might be pregnant with a half-alien baby, and no one ever tells him anything. Mentions of Loki, Thor, Nick Fury, Steve Rogers, and Sam Wilson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worst Week Ever

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: References to vomiting, hospitals, and medical procedures.

Clint Barton was definitely out of it this morning. It had been a restless night, tossing and turning and unable to find a comfortable position. His stomach felt tender and achy, like he had eaten something bad but his digestion refused to take care of it in the proper fashion, but occasionally there was a stabbing sensation. He couldn’t remember if he had forgotten to set an alarm or if he had just slept through it, but he woke up to a far too loud text noise and checked his cell for a message from Natasha: _6:39 am: Mission Alert: Extraction Imminent. Meet at the Curb (:_

He dully pondered to himself whether the smile was for him specifically or for everyone in a group text before remembering: _Meet at the Curb_. Shit, he was supposed to have been awake a full two hours ago, to meet up running with Steve at the Capitol! 

Clint prided himself on keeping in impeccable shape, and while of course it wasn't fair to compare himself to superbeings with completely altered cell structure, it was hard to deny a subtle sense of inferiority sometimes. At least the nice thing about archery was that his skills wouldn't deteriorate as fast as they would if he relied solely on sheer strength and stamina; even as age naturally wore down his muscle mass, so long as he maintained his reflexes he would be a formidable threat for years to come. So he kept agreeing to go running with Steve even though it was more an exercise in humility than anything else.

However, this morning he found he could barely aim himself through his own bedroom door, let alone sprint laps. He felt dizzy just standing up and had to hold the door frame for a moment to steady himself. His stomach still ached like crazy, so he made for the bathroom, pondering if there was anything in the medicine cabinet that might help. However, no sooner had he entered the bathroom than instinct his feet took him to the toilet instead, and in a second he was hunched over and spilling his guts into the bowl.

 _What did I eat??_ he wondered to himself as he breathed heavily once the vomiting subsided. 

Just then, he heard his phone making noise in the bedroom. He stumbled carefully back into the bedroom and picked up on the final ring before the call would have gone to voicemail. "Hello?" he asked, surprised at how weak and groggy his voice sounded.

“Where _are_ you?” Natasha’s voice was irritated. _Dammit, the mission!_ he remembered. After the morning run, they were supposed to be on their way for Fury’s latest assignment.

“I was sleeping, I—“

“Really, Barton? The nonagenarian was up earlier than you.”

“Of course he was up earlier than me, he probably had the early bird special at five and went to bed at 8:30 last night.”

Maybe it didn’t come out as funny as he hoped because of his weak voice, but Natasha didn’t laugh. “Okay, we’ll just swing over there. Will you be ready to go in 4 minutes?”

“D-don’t,” he stammered, placing a hand on his belly to stifle another throb of pain. “Honestly, Nat, I think I’m sick.”

“Look, if you need coffee we probably have time—“

“I’m serious, my stomach hurts like crazy and I threw up just before you called.”

He thought that would settle it, but Natasha was quiet on the end of the line. Then, after a pause: "You're sure you can't power through this? We've got a whole trip to the Indian Ocean for your stomach to calm down. They’ll have some anti-nausea drugs on board.”

He frowned, feeling guilty knowing that Natasha put up with extraordinary amounts of pain on the job. Clint was no malingerer, but despite her lack of enhancement Natasha seemed to have superhuman pain tolerance. After her years of training, she probably wouldn’t even bat an eye at something like this. 

However, already the pressure in his stomach was signaling another round of praying to the porcelain god, the pain curling him into the fetal position. "I really—- I really don’t think this is something I’m just going to get over riding on an airplane,” he replied, curling up so far he was practically staring at his own belly button. The prospect of being stuck in an enclosed space made him feel really claustrophobic at the moment, and generally he had no problem with such things. “I’m dizzy, I don’t think I can aim, and I can’t even think straight. I think I’d be more of a liability than anything else.”

There was another long pause. "Okay,” she said finally. Her voice was sympathetic but Clint still didn’t stop feeling guilty.

“I’m going to throw up again now, so if you’d rather not—“

He heard the call end, then let his hand with the phone fall to the floor as he did exactly as he had promised.

He tried to push away the guilt in the absurdity of “calling in sick” to a covert operation as he crawled back into bed-- but Fury hadn’t made it sound like Clint was particularly crucial to this sting, just that they could use some distance precision as they approached the hostage ship. In fact, sometimes he had the strange feeling his teammates were on a completely different assignment than he was. His skill set had limitation applications, but he supposed some of it was practical precaution, concerns about the aftereffects of extraterrestrial mind control. It stung to think that Fury didn’t totally trust him after his mind had been breached by Loki.

He thought about what a proper sick day was supposed to look like—since truth be told, he’d never really had a time in his life when he’d been free to truly relax and recover without feeling like he was letting down his team somehow. Wasn’t he supposed to have a mom or a girlfriend or something come over? Pick up some medicine on the way and make up a hot water bottle and some tea? Put on a show he liked and check on him every once and a while? His imagination briefly inserted Natasha into this role, but every time he asked her for something in a pathetic voice even in his imagination she simply cast him a withering look and continued with what she was doing. _Damn your own guilt, Clint_ , he thought. Then he tried imagining Fury instead, which was such an uncharacteristic and hilarious image it actually made him laugh out loud-- at which point he discovered laughing _really hurt_. He promptly silenced himself and shifted position, trying to find a way to lie that was comfortable again. Nothing seemed to be comfortable for more than about 45 seconds before he had to turn over onto his belly, then his back, then his side, then his other side . . . 

It was not long before he was on his knees in the bathroom again. 

The thought _This must be what morning sickness feels like_ ran across his mind. And then his stomach fell with a thud.

A couple months ago he had made the mistake of Googling “Loki” and found quite a bit of interesting information. For example, according to mythology the Norse god of mischief had fathered multiple monsters and _mothered_ an eight-legged horse; apparently Loki had shapeshifted into a mare in order to seduce a stallion to distraction, only to have ended up accidentally pregnant. At the time it had made him laugh heartily, feeling a little vindicated at the thought of the meanspirited little brother of Thor at the mercy of a horse dick and subsequently going through the agony of labor, but now the story stuck with him in a funny way. If Loki was capable of becoming pregnant as a man . . . what about impregnating _other_ men? He was an alien, after all. And what was that damn staff if not phallic? Plus if they lived to be something like 5,000 years old and after a millennium Thor looked barely 30 in human years, who could say for how long a half-Asgardian baby incubated? What if two years in he was only in the beginnings of the first trimester? 

He scrambled for his cell phone and, ignoring the pounding heat in his brain that probably indicated a fever, began furiously hammering out an email to Thor.

_Hey Thor,_

_So awkward question . . . How long do Asgardian babies incubate for, typically? And can Asgardians impregnate male humans? Please don’t be offended, I really just have no idea how it works._

_PS: Let me know if your brother has any ideas for baby names. I figure “Odin” is out but I’m rather partial to Bjorn and Helga._

However, before he even re-read what he had written to make the better judgement, he remembered he didn’t have Thor’s email address anyway. After suddenly appearing in London to battle a crew of elven aliens through several space portals and immediately disappearing again, Clint wasn't even sure if he was still on Earth, let alone in possession of a cell phone or computer.

Still, in his feverish mind, fueled by the all-too-real pain in his abdomen, the fear grew more and more vivid. How was a man even supposed to give birth without those parts? Did the baby come out the bellybutton, or . . . ?

Maybe it was that painful thought, maybe it was the sheer pain, but he threw up again—and this time he didn’t set the phone down in time, and it was like watching it happen to someone else in slow motion; the phone slipped from his hands to splash right in the middle of what he had just spilled from his belly. He closed his eyes and groaned.

He was half-tempted to simply flush the bowl clean and rinse clear the phone too large to follow the contents down the drain, but the phone probably wouldn't survive that. Not that it had necessarily survived this, either. In a different state of mind he would have fished it out as quickly and delicately as he could, wiped it down gently, and dashed around the apartment to fill a bowl with rice and bury it in for a few hours to suck out the moisture, but for now the most he could do was plunk it on the counter and leave it turned off.

Without his phone, he felt trapped. SHIELD employees typically didn’t bother with landlines given how often they needed to switch numbers, phones, and even apartments so now no one could reach him and he could reach no one-- and by now he was pretty sure he needed a hospital, too. So, reminding himself that Natasha had made a career of sucking up extreme pain, he labored to put on clothes, made one final deposit in the toilet, and headed to the hospital.

***

The emergency room at the downtown hospital was a busy place, but Clint was seen efficiently. He explained about the pain in his abdomen, the vomiting, and his suspicions of a fever-- _And I'm genuinely worried I might be pregnant with a potentially evil half-alien abomination_ , he added mentally but kept to himself.

He felt vindicated when they took his complaints far more seriously than Natasha had, quickly taking his temperature to confirm his high fever and asking about the pain if he pressed on his right side. As soon as he had choked down some bright pink sweetened tea laced with a chemical to make his insides glow on the scan and subjected to the unprecedented torture of an enema, he was put through a CT scan and then promptly given a diagnosis: appendicitis, calling for immediate removal.

The doctor explained this with appropriate seriousness and concern, but Clint had to suppress his smile and honestly felt like laughing. Appendicitis, a genuine medical emergency that required emergency surgery! Nobody was expected to "muscle through" an inflamed appendix! Hell, there were generals and astronauts that had their healthy appendixes removed specifically to avoid even the small _risk_ of the game-changing, life-threatening infection in high-stakes conditions. And wasn't that how Harry Houdini had died? Natasha, Steve, and Fury would have no right to give him a hard time about staying home!

A second wave of relief followed the first when he realized now that the doctors had thoroughly investigated his abdominal cavity, he was without a doubt _not pregnant_. _Ha!_ In the end all it really proved was that Loki had surely had no intention (or capability) of impregnating him in the first place, but he nevertheless felt triumphant. If the most damage Loki could do was leave behind an inflammation in an unnecessary appendage to his colon, then congratulations to him. _Hail to the god of useless organs!_ he thought to himself with a wry grin. What else did he have to lose? His tonsils? 

The surgery was a blank in his memory, which unsettled him a little upon waking since the last time he had woken from such absolute loss of consciousness was in the wake of alien mind control. He wasn't fully cognizant again until they were wheeling him up to the recovery room, by which point it was late evening. At least he came out of it gradually this time, rather than by blunt force to the skull.

As soon as he was settled in his bed, IV off to the side, doctor came in to give him a briefing about his condition. He explained that Clint had arrived just in time, because his appendix had burst during the procedure-- and although standard appendectomies were routine and reliable, to ensure none of the infection had remained inside of him they needed to keep him for observation for a while.

Frustrated but resigned, Clint nodded in polite agreement and was given a stack of papers to fill out and sign. He didn't see a release for morphine or anything particularly exciting. Most of his injuries had been handled in the field, and despite the greater risks of being treated by stressed medics in unsterilized conditions, Clint preferred it vastly over the hospital. Too much paperwork, too much expense. The only thing worthwhile about hospitals was better drugs, and apparently he was getting none of those.

This hospital also provided another unwelcome service, when the nurse finally looked up from her paperwork into his face. "Oh my god, I know you! I saw you on the news! You fought with the Avengers!"

 _I *am* one of the Avengers_ , Clint thought bitterly. But he replied politely: "Yes, pleasure to have served.” Although it stung to be left out of the picture entirely, most of the time he was grateful that little of the celebrity-like attention on Tony and Steve was turned on him. He liked his privacy, and at the end of the day he would rather the public not remember him at all than remember his stint as a hand of the enemy, a time he couldn't even remember for himself.

"Well it's good to know you're in town," she said. "We're probably the most at-risk city for terrorism after New York."

Clint nodded but smiled wryly to himself. One thing he learned in the field was that _every_ city, even small villages, liked to fancy itself a key target for terrorism-- because of their population, because of their key location on cargo train routes, because of their rich oil reserves, because of some corporation that considered itself extremely important—but at the end of the day terrorists and invaders went where they pleased with little predictable rhyme or reason; a nowhere place like Puente Antiguo one day, New York or London the next.

The nurse was just opening her mouth to speak again when her beeper went off and she checked it. "Hold on, they need me downstairs," she explained. She picked up the television remote and turned it on for him. "I'll just leave this for you here to keep yourself entertained. If you need the bathroom, be sure to call a nurse to help you."

She exited and Clint was left with the TV set to Nickelodeon. He picked up the remote she had set back on his bedside tray and tried to change the channel, but although the red light on the front kept blinking, nothing happened. He tried changing the volume to similar results. He did manage to turn the entire set on and off again, so apparently his options were Nickelodeon on quiet volume or nothing at all. _Well, okay_ , he thought to himself. _I guess I shouldn't be stressing myself out with anything too stimulating anyway._

Clint eyed the white telephone mounted on the wall near the bed, looking old and sad from lack of use. He wished he hadn't lost his cell phone to vomit and toilet water, but at least he had Natasha's cell number committed to memory. However, with her surely on route in a secure plane bound for an ocean on the other side of the world, he knew he wouldn’t have any luck reaching her for at least another 24 hours. The hospital probably had a phone book he could borrow, but his colleagues' cell phones were all purposely unlisted. He probably couldn't even get the general number of the SHIELD administration office-- and even if he could, calling from a landline traced to the hospital merely claiming he was Clint Barton probably wasn't going to get him very far along the chain of command. So he slumped back, resigned to at least one night in the hospital without visitors.

Clint soon discovered his bed malfunctioned just as the TV did. _Is this just the room where they put all the broken stuff?_ he wondered. He also had little luck with the call button to bring the nurses. The first time he needed to pee, after about twenty minutes of pushing the button he finally just got up to go himself, failing to understand what it was that was supposedly so difficult about peeing on his own beyond having to drag the IV after him. However, the nurse came in while he was in the middle of it and scolded him harshly enough for not waiting for assistance that he didn’t try that again. He just had to wait to pee when the nurses brought him his antibiotics and pain medication. He wished once again it were something stronger.

He watched some Nickelodeon that night, feeling like children’s cartoon programming had declined a lot since he was a kid, had a rather pathetic chicken cutlet and mashed potatoes sent to his room, and got a long night’s sleep. The next morning he started trying Natasha’s phone every few hours, but every time his call rang out without connecting him to voicemail. By the following morning her number bounced back with a response that it had been disconnected. _Guess her time was up with that one_ he figured, knowing standard SHIELD policy for agents was to change numbers once every 3 months minimum.

Days passed, and there was no word from Natasha or Steve, or even from SHIELD to inquire why had had not showed up to work. The few nurses he encountered seemed peculiarly busy and stressed and he wondered if it was an especially busy week or if the hospital was chronically understaffed. At any rate his concerns about the comfort of the room ranked low on their list of priorities, and although they changed his IV regularly and brought food within an hour of when he called, nothing was done about the TV or bed-- though one nurse took pity on his lack of visitors and brought him up a book of crossword puzzles from the lobby.

***

Finally, after six days in the hospital and one final “goodbye” enema and scan, the doctor determined there was no infection post-surgery as they had feared. All Clint needed was to sign a stack of release forms, wait a couple hours until someone could come brief him on his post-op recovery at home, and he was free to go.

When he heard the gentle knock on the side of his door, he thought it was the nurse come to remove his IV, but she entered suspiciously noiselessly. He looked up and saw Natasha, looking concerned.

"Oh, so glad you could make it in to visit before I went home,” he said, unable to hide the wounded spite in his voice.

“Clint . . .” she gaped at him, thoroughly puzzled. Then her eyes quickly scanned the room and she realized: “You have absolutely no idea what just happened, do you?" 

"What happened?"

"You don't get any news channels in here?"

"I don't, actually," he replied with a grimace. "I don't know if this is a new hospital policy meant to keep patients from getting stressed or what, but I only have one channel and it's--"

"You didn’t even look out your window once or twice?” she craned her neck to look out. “You can nearly see the Potomac from here.”

“What? Do the sunrises look nice over it or something?”

Natasha pursed her lips, then quietly shut the door. Apparently something _had_ happened.

“So, you know Project Insight?”

Clint shifted his eyes to the right. “No?” _Am I supposed to?_

She closed her eyes, eyebrows furrowing. “Dammit, Fury,” she muttered. “It . . . it was SHIELD’s covert project in conjunction with the World Security Council. Fury was working on it along with Pierce, but . . . never mind. The point is, it’s over now. And because of it, _SHIELD_ may be over now.”

“What?”

“SHIELD has been compromised, Clint. SHIELD has been compromised for a long time, actually. Do you—“ she suddenly looked very concerned. “Hail HYDRA?” she asked him, quirking a curious eyebrow as if this were something else he should be familiar with.

“Do I hail the what?”

“Oh good,” Natasha sighed. “HYDRA is what they call themselves. The conspiracy that’s been growing within SHIELD for . . . decades, apparently.”

“Yeah, well it looks like HYDRA has about the same opinion of keeping me in the loop that Fury does.”

Natasha smiled and shook her head, knowing he couldn’t be lying through such characteristic self-deprecating snark. However, Clint was far from relieved. “Nat . . . is everyone okay?”

“Yes,” she said with certainty. “Well, they’re alive, anyway. I guess you haven’t heard otherwise, but Fury is alive-- he just doesn’t want the world to know it. Steve and Sam are right here in the hospital. Steve is admitted," she explained. "Oh shit, you don’t even know who Sam _is_ yet. But Sam’s a good guy—we know that for sure, at least.”

“Who _isn’t_ a good guy?” Clint asked nervously.

“Well . . . Pierce wasn’t.” She swallowed. “But there’s going to be a lot of fallout as we find out who has been part of this that we had no idea. They took in a lot of people we trusted, Clint, and they’ve had the same access to technology that we have had all along. From the helicarriers to Steve’s supersoldier serum . . . and they’ve been using it.”

She stopped talking when she realized the lingering pain meds in Clint’s system were not conducive to him keeping track of all this.

"It's fine now," she breathed, sounding almost more like she was trying to convince herself than Clint. "Well-- no, it's not fine. It's really weird right now. I don't know what's going to happen, and until I know I'm not sticking around here to see if it goes sour. You might-- you might want to do the same." She knew both of them felt more comfortable as free agents than attached to a possibly sinking ship, no matter how large. The comfort and consistency of working with SHIELD had been a comforting change of pace, but if Natasha was concerned he knew she had good reason.

“You think we need to ghost?” he asked.

“Not . . . not from everyone,” she assured him. “In fact, I think we need the Avengers together more than ever.” She choked a little on her words, rare for her to do so. “When I broke into your apartment and you weren't there--"

"You broke into my apartment?"

"Of course," Natasha raised her eyebrows, as if this should have been obvious. "We needed you and we couldn't find you, so I went to where I thought you were." Then she added bitterly, "You might have least thought to let us know where you were if you weren't going to keep your phone with you."

She reached into her jacket and pulled out Clint's phone, looking surprisingly clean and functional.

"I saw you must have dropped it, but wasn't damaged," she explained. "Just disgusting."

She had apparently taken the trouble to clean it up for him, too-- though surely she wouldn't have been willing to carry it on her person otherwise-- and so he picked it up and turned on the screen, which immediately lit up and revealed notifications for no less than 147 missed calls. They were mostly from blocked numbers but also included Natasha's old phone and Tony’s cell. 

"I destroyed my phone as soon as we went underground,” Natasha explained. "So if you tried it, that's why you didn't have any luck."

"I did," he replied. "Yours was the only number I knew by heart."

She smiled and dropped her eyes. “You might have at least thought to email,” she scolded. “Email _me_ instead of Thor about . . . baby names?”

Clint colored brightly. When she’d checked his phone was still working, she had checked it exhaustively. He shouldn’t be surprised, but still.

Natasha laughed at his embarrassment. "I _thought_ I knocked him pretty clean out of there, but it seems like Loki's still messing with your head. I'd give it another try, but I'd rather not be dragged out of the hospital by security."

"Yeah, please don’t. They’re really stingy with the pain meds here.”

She rolled her eyes fondly. “You’re such a wimp. But hey, at least your scar should be pretty impressive.” She nodded to the thick pad of gauze on his abdomen. 

“Not as impressive as yours.”

Natasha tilted her head to one side and then, with a small grin lifted the hem of her shirt and rolled down the edge of her pants to reveal the jagged wound. “I dunno, I think we’ll pretty much match now.”

“Yeah, if my surgeon was drunk and blind,” he sniffed. “Can’t wait for you to be showing off your cool assassin scar while I’m just like ‘Oh yeah, my organ just decided to malfunction.’”

“But _I’m_ going to be jealous you look so much prettier in a bikini than me,” she teased.

“Is Fury’s next mission going to involve me in a bikini? Because if so, I’m definitely coming with you when you defect to Russia.”

Natasha offered him a half-smile; Clint was one of the few people who could get away with joking about something like that, but in this moment of chaos and uncertainty, maybe it wasn’t the right thing to say. She changed the subject. “Hey, before you check out, we should take a visit to Steve. His room’s not far from here.”

Clint agreed readily and made to get out of bed. In a world of constantly-shifting alliances, secrecy, and even mind control, it was everything to know that there were a few trusted people who still kept him in the loop.


End file.
